The Confessors' Club

by Jack Fredrickson

  With luck, too, the investigations would prove that Jim Whitman had been fed pills. And that might make Debbie Goring the recipient of some insurance proceeds, at last.

  And some of that might trickle down on me, but it would feel like dirty rain. Wendell was playing too tight with Lamm. He’d driven Whitman home an hour or so before he died; he’d hired a private detective who’d gotten killed. Wendell’s secrets put a darkness over everything, and that might well envelope his daughter. Damn the man, Wendell Phelps.

  Keller called. ‘I’m going to make you a star, Elstrom.’

  ‘I’m tapped out. You’ve gotten everything I’m going to give you.’

  ‘Who came knocking after this morning’s column?’

  ‘Ours was a one-shot deal. We’re done.’

  ‘You’re sure you won’t need me again?’

  ‘You’ll always bite at anything sleazy.’

  ‘The Chicago police?’

  ‘And the IRS,’ I said, folding like a paper tent.

  ‘Give me the agent-in-charge.’

  ‘Krantz.’

  ‘What’s with Wendell Phelps, your father-in-law?’

  ‘Ex-father-in-law,’ I corrected, ‘and he’s not involved.’

  ‘Wendell’s involved; his daughter Amanda is involved.’ He laughed, though it was more like a cackle.

  ‘You’re a bastard, Keller.’

  ‘Details to follow,’ he said, and hung up.

  Amanda was waiting in the Corner Bakery at what had been our favorite table, farthest from the window counter, before we got married. She’d gotten me a roast beef sandwich on a jalapeño roll, a Diet Coke and a brownie – my dinner of choice, back in the day.

  A copy of the morning’s Argus-Observer, opened to Keller’s column as Krantz’s had been at lunch, lay on the table next to her salad.

  ‘This unnamed “agent for a prominent businessman” is you?’ she asked as I sat down. Her voice was calm.

  ‘Should I eat the brownie first in case I have to run?’

  She didn’t smile.

  ‘You’ve talked to your father?’ I asked.

  ‘Mostly he apologized for being absent when I was growing up.’

  I touched the newspaper with my forefinger. ‘Your father is furious with me, but I had to sound an alarm before someone else died.’

  ‘That club.’

  ‘It needs to be exposed.’

  ‘My father has placed all voting authority of his common and preferred stock in my name. Worse, he’s begun transferring ownership of the stock itself to me as well. He says it’s in accordance with some tax plan his accountants and attorneys had long been planning to put in place, but I don’t believe him. He’s acting like a man about to die.’

  I looked again at Keller’s column lying open, a battlefield I’d strung with landmines that even I couldn’t see. ‘It’s going to come out that your father is a friend of Lamm’s.’

  ‘I figured Arthur was Keller’s “insurance biggie.” How exactly is my father involved?’

  ‘I think your father belongs to what’s known as the Confessors’ Club, a group of wealthy, influential men. I think he hired Eugene Small to tail some of the other club members because he was afraid some of them were being targeted, like Barberi, Whitman and Carson had been. When Small got killed, your father got truly scared. He hired bodyguards. You noticed that anxiety, and pressured him to hire me. He agreed because he still wanted answers, and he could control my investigation. When he realized that Lamm, his closest friend, might be behind the killings, he fired me.’

  ‘My father went along with murder, Dek?’ The words came out of her mouth dry and hoarse.

  ‘I’m pretty sure your father drove Whitman home the night he died, which might not mean anything other than it was an act of a friend. I’m also pretty sure your father sent Debbie Goring a hundred thousand dollars anonymously, because she’d gotten none of her father’s life insurance.’ I tried a smile. ‘That seems like the act of a friend, too.’

  She turned to look at a family at the next table. The little girl was putting a potato chip in her father’s hand.

  ‘I don’t understand any of this,’ she said. ‘What now?’

  ‘We hunker down and let the investigations run their course.’

  She leaned back, pulled a tissue out of her purse, and dabbed at her eyes. ‘My father and I were estranged, and then we were not … I wonder if I know him.’

  She didn’t ask any more questions, and I didn’t offer any more speculation. We ate a little, and talked of other things a little, and then she took a cab to her condo, and I hoofed it to the train station.

  And both of us headed away remembering when our evenings didn’t end that way and we understood so very much more than we did that night.

  FIFTY

  Dreading that Keller had done a follow-up mentioning Wendell or Amanda by name, I hustled out early the next morning to get the day’s Argus-Observer. But I did not go out early enough.

  I’d just grabbed a paper from the box in front of the Jiffy Lube when two vans with local television logos pulled up in front of the turret. Keller could have identified me in the paper I was holding, or Krantz – or any number of angry Chicago cops – could have made calls. What was certain was that television vans had rolled up. I was now in the light and the circus was about to begin.

  Going back directly meant video. I walked a half-mile down on Thompson Avenue, crossed, and came up the river path. The turret has only one door and it faces my stub of a street, so the short stretch around to the front required a sprint. Key in hand, I charged like Teddy Roosevelt up San Juan Hill, unlocked the door and ducked inside before the news folks even thought to set down their lattes.

  Angry hands began beating on my door as I climbed the stairs to my would-be office. The red light on my answering machine was flashing. Another light glowed constant: though I’d only been gone an hour, the recording tape had already maxed out. I listened to the first few messages. All were the same. Television and print reporters from as far away as Minnesota were requesting phone interviews. I left the machine full, so it couldn’t record any more.

  By now the incessant banging on my timbered door had taken on an arrhythmic, irritating quality that set my circular metal stairs, loose at points, to ringing in an unsympathetic vibration that pulsed through my head like an infected tooth.

  I have a large gray plastic wastebasket. It is thin, and tall, and rectangular. I used it to catch leaks before I got the roof fixed. I ran into the kitchen, filled it with cold water, and added a long spritz of dishwashing soap for color and bubbles. Forcing away any thoughts of restraint, I cranked open the slit window directly above the entry. Though lousy for admitting light, my windows are medievally correct for raining down liquids like boiling oil on marauding pillagers. And also, I hoped, for sudsy water. I upended the wastebasket out the window. The frigid soapy water cascaded magnificently down onto the door-bangers, bringing forth much yelling and swearing. The pounding stopped. It had been the minor gesture of an immature mind, and I retreated from the window a satisfied child.

  I scanned Keller’s column and saw no mention of the Confessors’ Club. The day’s new allegations concerned short-pours by crooked concrete contractors at a city park. Typical Keller: yesterday’s news was yesterday’s news. He’d flung a grenade and moved on. Details to follow.

  Not so the websites of Chicago’s main daily newspapers. All offered up new details, including speculation from unnamed law enforcement types that I was Keller’s unnamed agent, recaps of my involvement in the phony-check trial years before, and brief mentions of my marriage to Amanda Phelps, daughter of Wendell Phelps, a wealthy Chicagoan.

  None of the reporters had dug deep enough to mention the Confessors’ Club by name. Nor were there any references to Delray Delmar, though I supposed Krantz and the Chicago police were keeping a lid on him in the hopes of grabbing him, unawares.

  All the reports did note that Agent Krantz of th
e IRS would be holding a press conference at noon, to discuss matters that bore on the case.

  It would be a good day to not answer the phone or look out the window. I put sandpaper into the block, Robert Johnson into the ancient CD player, and worked on rebuilding my most troublesome kitchen cabinet.

  An hour later, a car horn sounded outside. Three blasts, a pause, and three more. It was the secret staccato from seventh grade.

  I peeked out the window. Leo and Endora had gotten out of his Porsche and were making their way through a cluster of the now seven news people thrusting microphones and aiming video cameras. Leo wore a black suit, black shirt, white tie and a cream fedora, and looked like a perfect miniature of a twenties-era gangster. Endora, much taller, was dressed as a flapper, in a pale blue beaded shift and a red cloche hat. Each of them carried a carton filled with groceries.

  I ran down the stairs, ringing the metal. No one bringing food has to wait at the door of my turret. I unlocked it, eased it open a crack.

  ‘Now,’ I yelled, tugging the door open all the way.

  Leo and Endora ran at the door, laughing. Endora came through, but Leo paused at the threshold. ‘Not only did Elstrom grab the Lindbergh baby,’ he yelled out, ‘but he killed Archduke Ferdinand to start World War One. And I have it on good authority that he’s personally responsible for the last two earthquakes that hit California.’

  I pulled him in and slammed the door on the shouting news people.

  Endora, still laughing at the theater of it, handed me her carton. It was filled with celery, carrots, apples and oranges, bottles of fruit juice, a head of lettuce, and some low-sodium microwavable meals. ‘It was my idea to bring you food, since we knew you’d be hunkering down. It was Leo’s idea to dress up.’

  ‘Good thing we’d gone to a costume party last fall,’ he said, setting his carton on the floor. He’d brought Twinkies, Oreos, Ho Hos, peanut butter and Cinnamon Toast Crunch, and several two-liter bottles of Diet Coke. He is my friend.

  ‘I’ll get us coffee,’ I said.

  ‘Laced with sawdust?’ Leo blew at the dust mites floating in the narrow beams of sunlight crisscrossing the room. ‘No. We only drink bathtub gin,’ he said, still in character, ‘and we don’t even have time for that. Endora has to be at work, and I’ve got a plane to catch.’

  They moved toward the door.

  ‘Ready?’ I asked.

  ‘Twenty-three skidoo,’ Leo shouted, and out they went.

  I slammed the door shut behind them and ran up the stairs to watch from the window above the entry. Leo marched towards his Porsche with his arms outstretched like a pint-sized southern governor. He held the car door open for Endora, the perfect moll, who paused to curtsy before getting in. Grinning, Leo went around, got behind the wheel, and drove them away with a loud blast of exhaust.

  FIFTY-ONE

  Semi-reclined in the electric-blue La-Z-Boy, the micro-television resting on my lap, I was ready. My hands balanced coffee, a stick of celery and a two-pack of Twinkies. It was exactly noon, the time Krantz was to hold his televised news conference.

  Krantz apparently wasn’t ready. He was late.

  The WGN noontime anchor, a trim fellow with a tanned face that likely had never been smeared with a Ho Ho, began to ad-lib to fill time.

  ‘While we wait, we have some … ahem …’ He lit his tan-toned face with a slightly trembling, professionally whitened smile, as though he were about to be overcome by something momentous. ‘… rather bizarre footage, shot earlier this morning outside the residence of one of the people allegedly involved in the newly unfolding secret club mystery.’ He nodded at some unseen technician, and the screen switched to tape.

  A videocam zoomed in on the window that was opening above the newsmen beating on the turret’s door. My face materialized from out of the gloom, pale as Marley’s ghost, followed by my hands, then arms, all struggling to tip a thin but obviously heavy wastebasket down at the ground below.

  ‘Vlodek Elstrom,’ Tan-tone narrated, ‘allegedly a source cited by John Keller in his newspaper column yesterday, apparently took offense to some news people seeking to interview him this morning …’ Tan-tone paused to let the video carry the spectacle.

  On the screen, my arms swiveled to upend the gray plastic wastebasket.

  ‘Whereupon, as you can see, well …’ Tan-tone chuckled softly, professionally overcome by the ludicrousness of what was unfolding.

  The water came. Soapy and glistening, it gushed down in a torrent of a million sparkling colors, drenching the two dark-suited reporters and setting them to jumping up and down and shaking their fists up at the window over their heads.

  The usually stern voice of Tan-tone dissolved into perfectly modulated laughter, and was joined by the guffaws of his always jocular sportscaster and the station’s newest weather sweetie, a hip Latina. Normally the little news-at-noon band offered fake laughs at the end of the show, to leave their viewers happy despite the murders and war deaths they’d just reported. There was nothing fake about the howls that day. Real tears of laughter were running down their cheeks. I would have laughed too, if it hadn’t been me on the screen, starring as the perfect jackass.

  ‘Let’s … replay … that …’ the almost hysterical voice of Tan-tone managed. But the screen cut abruptly to a shot of Agent Krantz standing at a podium, and I was saved.

  ‘I have a statement, and then I will take questions,’ Krantz began, adjusting his reading glasses. ‘Approximately four months ago, we began investigating allegations of accounting irregularities at the Lamm All-Risk Insurance Company. Based upon the information we obtained during this careful and thorough investigation, we have now issued warrants for the arrest of Mr Arthur Lamm, charging him with failure to maintain mandated premium accounts, use of premium balances for personal expenditures, illegal reimbursement of political donations, providing illegal discounts, and falsifying policy applications. Other charges may follow.’ He took off his reading glasses and attempted to smile. ‘If there are any questions, I will be happy to take them now.’

  He’d just announced charges for the sorts of business irregularities that never headlined the news and said nothing about what had drawn the reporters: the killings coming out of the graystone on Delaware.

  Everybody shouted at once. ‘Is Arthur Lamm connected to the secret society?’

  ‘The so-called Confessors’ Club?’ Krantz asked.

  ‘Confessors’ Club?’ several people yelled. The name was new to them.

  For a moment, Krantz appeared flustered. ‘It’s what some people call it, I’ve heard. Mr Lamm’s brokerage carried the insurance on the property.’

  ‘That’s the only relationship?’

  ‘We believe he also managed the maintenance of the property.’

  ‘Come on, Krantz; this isn’t important enough to hold a press conference.’

  Krantz shrugged.

  ‘Lamm ran this Confessors’ Club?’

  Krantz shrugged again.

  ‘Where is Lamm now?’

  ‘As I said, we have issued warrants for his arrest,’ Krantz said.

  ‘You’re not interested in the deaths of the businessmen and the private eye?’ the well-creased political reporter for the local ABC affiliate shouted.

  The room went quiet as everyone strained to hear.

  Krantz’s face acted confused. ‘Chicago homicides are never our purview.’

  ‘You’re saying you’re only investigating Arthur Lamm for income tax?’

  ‘We’re the Internal Revenue Service. That’s our job.’

  ‘And in this matter, you’re only interested in Arthur Lamm?’ someone shouted.

  ‘Well …’ Krantz said slowly, as coy as a young girl in gingham being asked on a first date. ‘There is another individual.’

  ‘Give us a name, Krantz.’

  ‘I’ll only say that he is a business partner of Lamm’s. We’re not ready to name him at this time.’

  And there it was, squeeze t
heater, performed for an audience of one: me. Krantz would go public with Wendell’s name, and innuendo, unless I got more cooperative.

  The shouting got louder. The press was ravenous for the new name and was yelling for more angles into the Confessors’ Club.

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ Krantz yelled, ‘you are asking me questions about murders.’ He flashed a humorless smile, tossed out a quick ‘Thank you very much’ and strode abruptly from the podium.

  He’d completed his mission artfully. He’d used a bland statement about the ongoing IRS investigation to limit its responsibility to income-tax issues only. The IRS should not be blamed for any lack of progress in a murder case.

  And he’d called out the name: the Confessors’ Club.

  He was the only one who’d used it.

  He’d used the name, too, during our lunch at the Chinese restaurant. I supposed that needed to mean nothing. Krantz was way out in front of Pawlowski and Wood and all the Chicago cops who hadn’t yet known the name. He’d been investigating Arthur Lamm for months.

  Still, I wondered how Krantz had learned the name. He’d used it so easily, so familiarly, at our aborted lunch. He’d known its members met on the second Tuesdays of even-numbered months. He seemed to have known about Eugene Small, and about Delray Delmar, too.

  He’d been investigating for months, I told myself again.

  Still …

  I thought then of how promptly Krantz had dispatched one of his agents to the turret with copies of Lamm’s appointments calendar. And the agent’s almost dutiful request to see a little more of the turret, and how I’d shown him the second floor, the floor where I worked at a card table, the floor where I did most of my talking on the phone.